photo gallery

This is crazy. New photos have appeared in Google Maps showing unidentified titanic structures in the middle of the Chinese desert. The first one is an intricate network of what appears to be huge metallic stripes. Is this a military experiment?

Some unidentified agency, company or person has been ordering hundreds of photographs of this area since 2004. Check out that story here.

They seem to be wide lines drawn with some white material. Or maybe the dust have been dug by machinery.

It’s located in Dunhuang, Jiuquan, Gansu, north of the Shule River, which crosses the Tibetan Plateau to the west into the Kumtag Desert. It covers an area approximately one mile long by more than 3,000 feet wide.

The tracks are perfectly executed, and they seem to be designed to be seen from orbit.

NASA recently released these spectacular time-lapse videos of Earth, created from thousands of photographs taken by astronauts on board the International Space Station. We’ve edited together the highlights, which include soaring over the Mediterranean, North America, the Middle East, and Africa. Keep an eye out for the red and green aurora borealis and australis over the poles, as well as bursts of lighting in the clouds.

Earlier this year, David Guttenfelder, chief Asia photographer for the Associated Press, along with Jean H. Lee, AP bureau chief in Seoul, were granted unprecedented access to parts of North Korea as part of the AP’s efforts to expand coverage of the isolated communist nation.

The pair made visits to familiar sites accompanied by government minders, and were also allowed to travel into the countryside accompanied by North Korean journalists instead of government officials. Though much of what the AP journalists saw was certainly orchestrated, their access was still remarkable.